Three Seconds

connection with a delivery meant a drugs-related murder. And a drugs-related murder always meant investigation and lots of hours, lots of resources.
    ‘A mule, a swallower who’s delivered the goods right here in the kitchen.’
    He turned towards the sitting room.
    ‘And him? What do we know about him?’
    ‘Nothing.’
    ‘Nothing?’
    ‘Not yet. You have to have something to do, Grens.’
    Ewert Grens went back into the sitting room and over to the man who no longer existed, watched as two men took hold of his arms and legs, as they lifted him and put him into a black body bag, as they pulled up the zip and put the body bag on a metal stretcher trolley that they only just managed to push down the narrow hall.

He left Vasagatan and then got caught in a traffic jam by Slussen. It was nearly five o’clock and he should have been at the kindergarten an hour ago.
     
    Piet Hoffmann sat in the car and desperately tried to fend off the stress and heat and irritation caused by the afternoon traffic, which he could do nothing about. Three lanes at a standstill as far down the tunnel as he could see. To combat this battle with the city, he often thought about the soft skin on Zofia’s face when he stroked it, or Hugo’s eyes when he managed to cycle on his own, or Rasmus’s hair, splashed with carrot soup and orange juice, standing out in every direction. It didn’t work.
Who did you do time with?
Images of the people he was thinking about merged every time into images of a deal in a flat in Västmannagatan that had ended in another man’s death.
Skåne. Mio. Josef Libanon. Virtanen. The Count. How many names do you want?
Another infiltrator with the same mission as him.
Who else?
But the other infiltrator who sat facing him just didn’t act as well.
Who else?
He, if anyone, should know what a faked background looked like, how it was put together, and which questions were needed to make it collapse. They had both been working for the police in their respective ways and ended up in the same place. He didn’t have any choice, otherwise they might both have died, and one was in fact enough, one who wasn’t him.
    He had seen people die before. It wasn’t that. It was part of his daily life and his credibility required it; he had learnt to shrug off dead people who weren’t close to him. But he had been in charge of this operation. A murder, he risked life imprisonment.
    Erik had phoned from the airport outside Jacksonville. Nine years as a secret civil servant on the unofficial payroll of the Swedish police had taught Piet Hoffmann that he was valuable. The authorities had magicked away offences in both a private and professional capacity before, so Erik Wilson should be able to make this one vanish too. The police were good at that, a few secret intelligence reports on the right bosses’ desks was usually enough.
    The temperature had risen in the stationary car and Piet Hoffmann dried away the sweat from his shirt collar just as the blasted queue started to move. He fixed his eyes on a number plate that was edging slowly forwards a few metres ahead and forced his mind back to images of Hugo and Rasmus and his real life, and twenty minutes later got out of the car in the visitors’ car park at Hagtornsgården, in the midst of all the flats in Enskededalen.
    By the front door he suddenly stopped with his hand in the air, a few centimetres from the handle. He listened to the voices of the noisy, boisterous children who were playing and smiled, lingering a while in the best moment of the day. He went to open the door, but stopped again; something tight across his shoulders. He quickly felt under his jacket, heaved a sigh of relief – he
had
remembered to take off his holster.
    He opened the door. It smelt of baking, a late snack for some of the children who were sitting round a table in the lunch room. The noise was coming from further in, the big play room. He sat down on a low stool in the entrance, near the tiny shoes and colourful jackets on pegs marked with the children’s names and hand-drawn elephants.
    He nodded at one of the young women, a new member of staff.
    ‘Hi.’
    ‘Are you Hugo and Rasmus’s dad?’
    ‘How did you guess? I haven’t—’
    ‘Not many left.’
    She disappeared behind some shelves filled with well-used jigsaw puzzles and square wooden building blocks and reappeared almost immediately with two boys aged three and five who made his heart laugh.
    ‘Hello,